New entertainment giant Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has outlined its bold plans to merge HBO Max and Discovery Plus into a single streaming service.
Speaking on the company's latest earnings call (opens in a new tab), WBD executive JB Perrette announced his ambition to launch the as-yet-unnamed platform by 2023 in the United States.
The service in question will bring together the broad portfolios of WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc. under one streaming roof to provide "something for everyone in the home," Perrette explained. Currently, WBD's network offering includes HBO, CNN, DC Comics, Discovery Channel, Food Network, HGTV, Magnolia Network, OWN, TBS and TNT.
"At the end of the day, bringing all the content together was the only way we saw to make it a viable business," Perrette told analysts.
Rollout of the new streamer will begin in the US next summer (i.e. June-September 2023), before expanding to Latin America later this year and HBO Max-supported European markets in early 2024. .
There was no mention of the platform's title during WBD's earnings call, and its pricing structure also remains under wraps. However, Perrette noted that the company is "researching how to reach customers in the free space with advertising," suggesting that a free subscription tier could be launched to sit alongside the premium and discounted tiers available on HBO Max. .
Explaining how the new streamer will prove to be greater than the sum of its parts, Perrette said: “HBO Max has a competitive feature set, but has had performance and customer issues. Discovery Plus has the best performance and consumer ratings, but more limited features. Our combined service will focus on providing the best of both worlds.
As of March 2022, HBO and HBO Max had a combined subscriber base of approximately 77 million. Add Discovery Plus's subscriber pool to that figure, and both platforms currently serve somewhere in the region of 92 million customers.
Following the launch of this new super streamer, WBD hopes to reach 130 million subscribers worldwide by 2025. For comparison, Netflix has, at the time of writing, just under 221 million subscribers, while Disney Plus serves about 140 million.
For more analysis on Warner Bros. Discovery's latest earnings report, find out why its latest MCU-style plan for the DCEU won't work.
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